News

Associate Professor of Political Science Russell Crandall and senior political science major Paige Donnelly penned an article for The American Interest on El Salvador's recent elections.

It’s been a hell of a couple weeks in tiny El Salvador. The both troubling and inspiring events began with the March 9 run-off presidential election that pitted Norman Quijano of the rightist ARENA party against the leftist incumbent FMLN party and its former guerrilla commander Salvador Sánchez Cerén. In the weeks leading up to the vote, polls had predicted an easy win for the Sánchez Cerén given the popularity of their new and ambitious welfare programs in a New Jersey-size country of six million where a third of the population lives in poverty. Yet the vote was extremely close as undecided voters in this socially conservative Central American nation might have feared that Sánchez Cerén would usher in “another Venezuela.”